Mozilla has created a new project called "Common Voice" with the goal of collecting 10,000 hours of speech. They have created a very nice web app to collect and validate submitted speech. Their goal is to collect 10,000 of speech. From their website:

What is Common Voice?

[...] Common Voice is a project to make voice recognition
technology easily accessible to everyone. People donate their voices to a
massive database that will let anyone quickly and easily train
voice-enabled apps. All voice data will be available to developers.

[...]

When will the dataset be available?

Mozilla aims to begin to capture voices in June and release the open source database later in 2017.

All speech submitted will be released under the CC-0 license (public domain). They are starting with English, and acknowledge the need to add more languages.

Human Interact's first game: Starship Commander

Starship
Commander is a virtual reality title driven by human speech. The
audience is given agency in the middle of a sci-fi story, as part of a
military embroiled in a dark intergalactic war. You’re in command of a
secretive mission, and your decisions have deadly consequences.

The site has a very cool trailer, showing how you can command your very own ship like Captain Kirk.

Speech recognition and understanding is supplied by Microsoft's Custom Speech Service, a new speech service that lets you create customized acoustic and language models... Looks like Open Source has had it right all along, because we've always known that customized acoustic and language models work best for users...

DeepSpeech: an open source speech recognition engine. It is based off of Baidu’s research and which will use Google's TensorFlow machine learning framework. It’s currently in early development.

Pipsqueak: a longer term goal to create a new speech recognition engine that implements cutting edge technology to allow Vaani to work
completely off-line while still allowing for the high quality speech
recognition users have become used to.

Murmur: a simple webapp for collecting speech samples to train speech
recognition engines. They want to slowly build a speech corpus to
train their open source models.

One thing to note, is that although they want to create their own speech corpus, for now they are planning to use a purchased speech corpus for their acoustic models.

The Mycroft AI, Inc. has released an open source platform called Mycroft core that promises to allow users to "use natural language to control the Internet of Things". the Mycroft framework also includes an intent parser called adapt and a TTS engine (based on CMU's Flite) called mimic. For speech recognition they are currently using Google's cloud-based speech recognition service.

They've also created a reference hardware implementation based on Raspberry Pi and Arduino and have had successful kickstarter and indiegogo campaigns to raise funds.

Since their stated goal is to provide an open source alternative to the likes of Amazon echo, the Mycroft AI group has started a new initiative called OpenSST (an Open Source Speech To Text project) looking to create "open source speech-to-text models"... likely for Kaldi.

"As Hassabis told reporters, the same principles AlphaGo uses have many
applications, from better digital personal assistants to improved
medical diagnostics and far, far beyond. Because the algorithm is
general-purpose, it could respond nimbly to complex information like
voice instructions, for example. "

From general reading, it looks like AlphaGO uses two neural networks working together to prune the search space and evaluate the next move.